Preventing ‘robotised women workers’: women,sport and the workplace in Scotland 1919–1939

This article examines a new area of women's leisure; women's participation in work-related sport. The growth and development of industrial welfare in Scotland in the interwar period will be discussed. Within broader studies, Stephen Jones, Helen Jones and Melling have all indicated that there was a growth in industrial welfarism in Britain from the turn of the twentieth century. This development of welfarism, which included provision of educational classes, pensions and medical support, increasingly also encompassed a variety of sports and physical activities. By looking at case studies, developments in provision across a range of industries will be examined. This discussion will draw on a wide range of sources from a variety of women's employment, from factories to clerical positions and from the retail sector to the civil service. This article will examine the types of sporting opportunities open to women through their workplaces, including organised welfare schemes and independent employee-led activities. Moreover, it will explore working women's experiences of these activities and the ways in which they chose to participate in sport.     

‘The Woman was a Stranger’: childbirth and community in eighteenth-century England*

On 17 December 1766 James Field stood accused at the Old Bailey of the ‘wilful murder of a new born child, by casting it into a tub of water’. The case was exceptional in many ways—not only was the accused male but he and his family had removed themselves from the network of neighbourly interactions that characterised lower status life in this period. As a result, the court's deposition statements record ideas of belonging and community with unusual clarity. Using Field as a case study, this article explores the involvement of the local community in the experience of childbirth in the eighteenth century. It will argue that childbirth had an active role in the creation of neighbourhood, and momentarily captured shifting eighteenth-century understandings of community.     

In Search of Equal Citizenship: the campaign for women magistrates in England and Wales, 1910–1939

In early 1920 women in England and Wales sat as Justices of the Peace (JPs) for the first time, becoming the first women to have any formal role in the country’s law courts. Less than thirty years later nearly a quarter of JPs were women, a proportion unparalleled in any other activity of civic and public life other than voting. Yet the legislation that admitted women to the magisterial bench—the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act—is usually pronounced a failure by historians. This article argues that the appointment of so many women to the magisterial bench in a relatively short period of time was a success for the women’s movement and that it was due very largely to the agency of some of the early women magistrates themselves and the efforts of the organisations to which they belonged, albeit working with the grain of reform in the criminal justice system. The article also maps the campaigners’ use of the twin concepts of ‘rights’ and ‘duties’ within their overall project for the advancement of equal citizenship.     

World citizens: Australian women’s internationalist broadcasts, 1930–1939

This article examines how Australian women broadcasters used radio to claim their own voices as experts on international affairs and encourage other women to become active world citizens in the 1930s. During a decade when the Great Depression limited the ability of many to travel, and the increasing calamity of the rise of fascism and the descent into World War II brought foreign affairs to the forefront of public debate, broadcasting became a key tool used by internationalist women to educate their female listeners about the world beyond Australia’s shores. They also used the medium to encourage other women to become actively involved in international causes including feminism, peace activism and Zionism. Through their broadcasts, women such as Constance Duncan, Irene Greenwood and Ruby Rich demonstrated the value of radio as a tool for active citizenship and further opened up the public sphere to women’s voices and opinions on social and political issues.     

The ‘intrusion of women painters’: Ethel Anderson,modern art and gendered modernities in interwar Sydney,Australia

In the interwar period in Sydney, Australia, male art gallery trustees, directors, and art schoolteachers objected to female advocacy and practice of artistic responsiveness to the modern. The dialogue between these two parties has often been interpreted in terms of a margin/centre dichotomy. Closer examination of the case of Ethel Anderson suggests that this model is inadequate. She demonstrated the transnationally apparent predilection of women to infusing civic cultures with the fleeting and everyday, thus inverting the spatial cues to cultural authority and presenting a gendered challenge to institutionalised, masculine notions of cultural authority.     

The Missionary Narrative as Coercive Interrogation: seduction,confession and self‐presentation in women’s ‘letters home’ 1

This article takes as its starting point the late nineteenth and early twentieth century missionary discourse of feminine self‐denial, and attempts to chart the ways in which it became a subversive theme in women missionaries’ ‘letters home.’ It argues that in the simultaneously public and private act of letter writing, women missionaries created complex sexual and political self‐narratives. By co‐opting the imperial rhetoric of a threatening, violent East, and then setting up their letters as conversations with an invisible interrogator, missionary women repeatedly forced their audiences to discover the various ways in which they had been seduced by this East, and had thereby deviated from accepted feminine norms. In the process, they both reinforced imperial notions of race and civilization and undermined the likewise imperial notion of protective domestic space.     

‘Girls who arouse dangerous passions’: women and bathing, 1900-39

Abstract

This article focuses on the struggle by women to achieve unsegregated access to beaches and swimming pools in Britain from the beginning of the twentieth century until the start of the Second World War against a background of bureaucratic regulation. Through a variety of sources that contrast official material with the mood within popular culture, it exposes the clash of patriarchal prudery against changing public opinions. It poses questions on the notions of female modesty and emancipation as women's swimwear reflected changing perceptions of the female body and explores conflicting discourses of glamour and sex versus health and efficiency.     

‘Purifying’ the public world: feminist vigilantes in late Victorian England

In late nineteenth-century England, a number of feminists confronted prostitution through the closing of brothels and the expulsion of prostitutes from places of entertainment. Feminist historians have either understood this behaviour as reflective of feminist' powerlessness within the largely non-feminist movement for social purity, or they have neglected the behaviour and concentrated on the aspects of these women' work that appear more positive to feminists today. Neither approach attempts to understand why women took this more repressive stance and thought of it as feminist. To understand the actions of these women, it is necessary to recognise that their vision of a ‘purified’ public and private world was often informed by religious beliefs and adherence to temperance. Concern with the morality of public space also related to women' desire for safety in public places. And their ‘repressive’ and statist actions related in part to feminist philanthropist' changing attitude toward local government.     

‘red tips for hot lips’: advertising cigarettes for young women in Britain, 1920-70

The girl or woman smoker is a twentieth-century phenomenon. In 1900, smoking was invariably associated with sexually deviant womanhood. Today, smoking is firmly, if contentiously, established as a feminine practice in British society. This article examines one aspect of the twentieth-century feminisation of smoking in Britain, namely, the ways in which smoking practices have been presented as appropriate for young women in the period 1920-70. Advertisements featured in magazines for young women aged 15-29 years have been chosen as a particularly apt medium through which to explore some of the ways in which cigarettes and smoking practices have been delineated and infused with meaning. These advertisements constituted a discourse for the circulation of messages about the relationship of women to cigarettes. Findings reveal a number of shifts in cigarette advertisements featured in Women's magazines from 1920 to 1970. Firstly, during the 1930s and early 1940s, advertisements were, in contrast to later counterparts, preoccupied with establishing smoking as a feminine practice. Key to processes by which smoking was feminised were various mechanisms whereby the cigarette was depicted as part of the presentation of a heterosexual identity and where smoking practices were embedded in heterosexual relations and rituals. Secondly, there was a discernible shift in the way women were addressed by advertisements, from potential women smokers in the 1930s to more general consumers in the 1960s. Thirdly and relatedly, the significance attached to women smoking changed between 1920 and 1970. In the 1930s, smoking was utilised to signify that women were ‘modern’; in the period 1960-70, smoking served to indicate that women were recognised, and accorded status, as consumers     

Angela Carter's ‘The Sadeian Woman’ and Female Desire in England 1960–1975

In The Sadeian Woman (1979) Angela Carter suggested that the visions of free female sexuality created by the Marquis de Sade in his violent pornographic novels provided insight into existing female sexualities in her own—British—society. In this article the representation of female sexuality in novels set in contemporary British society, written by women, and published between 1960 and 1975, is examined in relation to Carter's exegesis of the good, virtuous Justine and the meretricious, sexually desirous Juliette, two contrasting characters from Sade's work. The limitations of the three other alternatives present in the novels are described; containment within long-term marriage, good-hearted promiscuity; and the rejection of emotional repression. Then Carter's own solution to women's sexual inequality is placed in the context of feminism in the late 1970s, and the role of the novels in contributing to change is acknowledged.     

‘ah famous citie’: women,writing, and early modern London

This article explores aspects of the textual relationship between women and early modern London by examining three verbal ‘snapshots’ of the city in works either written by women or focusing on women in their urban environment. The first text, Isabella Whitney's ‘Wyll and Testament’ (1573), addresses London from a rural perspective, treating the city as a fickle male to whom she wants to hand back all his treasures. The poem constructs a vivid and ironic social topography, giving a glimpse of the roles of men and women in the Tudor city. The second text is by Mary Carleton, the roguish Restoration figure who defended her apparently ‘counterfeit’ life in the prose of The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663). Carleton's London is a place of unwanted seduction and sexual intimidation, highlighting a gendered moral geography even while the memoir itself titillates the reader with the account of her bizarre experiences. Finally, in a coda to the discussions of Whitney and Carleton, early eighteenth-century London is viewed through Jonathan Swift's satirical mock-pastorals of squalid urban life, in which female identity, like the city itself, is a site of violence, disgust and deception. Together, these textual representations of women and early modern London indicate the complex interactions of gender, literature and the early modern city. The analysis of the texts also suggests the significance of the ironic voice as a quintessentially urban literary mode, the prevalence of the idea of woman as a commodified topographical site, and the function of metaphors of courtship or marriage as indicators of the paradoxical attractions of the city.     

The ‘work as bad’ thesis in economics: origins,evolution, and challenges

This paper argues that in all major of epochs of economic thought – mercantilist, classical, and neoclassical – work has been portrayed as an unloved necessity. Politically, the treatment of work as a necessary evil has created undue pessimism about the prospects for progress in the quality of work and has helped to justify repressive policies to compel the working population to work hard. The ‘work as bad’ thesis, however, has been challenged by several writers, including Marx and the American institutional economists Commons and Veblen. These authors showed how the costs of work were socially determined and highlighted the possibility for intrinsically rewarding work under a transformed system of work. It is argued that in spite of some efforts to extend the analysis of work in mainstream economics such analysis is still lacking in comparison with similar analysis developed outside the mainstream paradigm. The paper outlines some of the strengths of an alternative economics of work based on insights drawn from non-mainstream economics.     

‘The dumpling in my soup was lonely just like me’: food in the memories of Mennonite women refugees

This article analyzes food memories as expressed in the oral and written memory sources of Mennonite women refugees who migrated from the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1940s to Canada and (less so) South America. The specific case study is informed by theoretical models brought to the study of memory by historian Luisa Passerini. In particular, her work on the psychological and emotional meaning inherent in memory is evident here, as Mennonite women associate food with past experience both traumatic and life saving. As such, Passerini's notion of memory's double character fits the pattern of food memory that aligns with polar times of deprivation and abundance.